Eric LeVan

Web Development

When I'm not developing web things, I've been known to enjoy homebrew, zombies and pizza. In my free time, I can be found in the kitchen conjuring various edibles or arguing with my cats.

My Nerd Palette

Play/Pause Palette Animation

Linux

Apache

MySQL

PHP

HTML 5

CSS

jQuery

Linux

Years of Linux dedication by its fanatics have led it through some serious evolution since its inception by Linus Torvalds. Since then, many distributions have surfaced with well-established communities.

It was modeled after core computer science principals in an effort to provide efficiency backed by tried and true security features. This makes it a perfect candidate to function as a server operating system.

In the end, there's just something alluring about free software.

Apache

As far back as I can remember, Apache has been the authority on handling HTTP requests.

It's easy to set up and fully reliable.Like your mom... !!! Hey, get out of my head!

MySQL

I'm no database administrator, but sometimes I play one. MySQL provides a perfectly lightweight database solution that scales well.

Coupled with PHP, it becomes an invaluable resource for maintaining all my persistant data.

And with front-end tools like phpMyAdmin, high-level administration becomes a much simpler task.

PHP

The Hypertext Preprocessor has been around since 1995. It's been instrumental in paving the way for web development in conjunction with open-source platforms. It's weakly typed, but far from weak.

PHP delivers critical server-side functionality with little overhead.

Of course it's best used with a lightweight framework such as CodeIgniter to drastically reduce development time and spackle up those pesky security holes.

HTML 5

"Can you make this in HTML 5?!"

"Umm, sir. You're holding a bagel."

The newest revision of HTML has already invaded the Internet. It takes a little work to get the older browsers onboard with the whole idea of HTML 5, but once everyone is playing by similar rules you can put together some really cohesive designs that respond well on multiple platforms.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets enable us to separate our markup from our visuals. It has evolved with HTML in form and function. We're slowing gaining on the CSS 3 specification. New effects are becoming available that make it easy to couple high-end visuals with animation.

Many of these prototypical features are already in heavy use including support for previously unusable fonts. Check out Google Web Fonts for free fonts anyone can use.

jQuery

jQuery is one of the most useful frameworks I've ever worked with. It takes a sometimes obscure javascript and molds it into a powerful tool. It's a spring-board to offer serious power to the client in addition to connectivity to server-side applications via AJAX.

Without it, you would have a very sad HTML 5. Even the vertical slider you're reading this on is powered by my good buddy jQuery.